Link
by slacktension
Summary: Katara tells the boys stories of her childhood. Mako-centric.


Katara's brown hands are dusted with dark spots of age, skin turned thin on the backs of her hands to reveal each slow shift of muscle and bone. Her fingernails are slightly yellowed and grown thick like rounds of chalk, scraping at the soft wet innards of mussels and clams. Her palms are still thick and dusty pink, marred with gently faded scars that slowly travel across the skin, like the sketched lifelines carved there since birth. Her hands are wet and stuck to them are gritty flecks of sand and chipped pieces of shell and seaweed.

Like Mako's hands, the young man realizes, as he puzzles the fat knife blade to the lips of a clam, giving an effortless twist of the wrist to pry it open. His are just younger, rougher, with more scars that stick out pink and raw against his pale skin.

They work and listen to Senna and Korra. Senna stands at the woodburning stove, watching a stew, while Korra leans against the countertops and rambles on and on about everything she's seen in the city. He's the only person in the room that's not Water Tribe, the only person with that claim allowed to help fix the meal.

With a gust of wind followed by vibrating footsteps, Ikki barrels into the room with Bolin trailing behind, the pair of them wearing matching smiles.

"Gran Gran!" Ikki says, latching onto her grandmother's arm and bouncing on her heels. "Gran Gran, you promised, you said at 3 o' clock that you'd tell us stories, I want to hear stories!"

Katara is silently surprised by the interruption, eyes wide and blinking down at her granddaughter, before lifting and finding the same eager excitement on the 16 year old boy behind her. Mako bites down on his bottom lip and flickers his eyes from Katara to his brother, wondering if he should at least tell Bolin to let the old woman be.

But Katara bounces back with a warm smile, and sets her knife down. "Alright, alright. Let me wash up and I'll tell you stories."

Ikki twirls up into the air with an excited squeal, while Bolin laughs and claps his hands together, eyes glued to the weightless seven year old before him. Mako allows himself a short eye roll before smiling down at his hands, content to stick with his work.

Until Katara's hand gently pats his, and he jerks his head up in surprise. She smiles.

"I think we've done enough work for today."

—-

Somehow, he finds himself settled in among thick furs and blankets, Bolin pressed against his right side, with Meelo on his left. They look up at Katara in her soft, plush armchair, Ikki nestled in her lap.

Mako's feet stick out from under the edge of the blanket. He's far too big to be tucked in like this anymore. Meelo has his hands tightly wrapped around his arm, bald head leaning against the rough fabric of his grey coat, so there is no way he can excuse himself from the room.

He doesn't even remember being invited to intrude upon quality time between a grandmother and her grandchildren - he just remembers Katara's hand on his shoulder, pointing out where to toss the heavy furs. He remembers being told to sit for a while as Katara silently pulled out a blanket, unfolded it, and let it billow out in a soft curve over Bolin and his bodies. Meelo came scrambling in after.

"Gran Gran, can you tell us stories about Grandpa?" Jinora begs, voice coming from somewhere around Bolin.

Bolin nods. "Yeah, tell us about Avatar Aang!" Mako jabs him with his elbow and Bolin barely winces. "Please!"

Katara laughs, quiet but rich, more airy like the small laughs Tenzin's children and wife manage to pull out from the man. She shifts slightly to hold Ikki with more ease, bringing a finger up to tap her chin, watery blue eyes staring at the ceiling.

"How much do you boys know about Aang?" she asks.

—-

They know the general story, but Jinora clicks her tongue, and Ikki shakes her head with her nose in the air, while Meelo naws on Mako's sleeve, all to show their disapproval.

Katara starts from the beginning.

"In the time without Aang," Katara says, "The world was a smaller place. This compound was bigger than my tribe. The Fire Nation was feared, the Air Nomads gone, and many families torn apart by war. Then everything changed, when my brother and I found the new Avatar."

Aang is a bald little boy with large ears and an even larger smile, tattoos that twist up his wiry arms and legs, disappearing beneath robes of orange. Sokka is a brother who wants to be a warrior, who doesn't trust this stranger (_sounds like somebody I know Bolin whispers and Mako's too content to jab him in the side again_), who believes bending is magic. Katara is a young girl whose weathered face lights up with giggles and smiles as she recalls every detail of slipping down sunset colored ice chutes, with a boy who reminded her of fun.

—-

But then Zuko is confused about where he stands on wavy lines called right and wrong. Toph is proud and confident but she runs away from her controlling parents to do what she believes is right.

(_Sounds like somebody we know Bolin whispers again sadly, and Mako just rests his head on top of his brother's with a sigh_)

Sokka acts like the younger brother and tries to prove himself, to carve out his importance among those who have so much identity already. Aang is unsure of what he is capable of while the world's eyes are turned to him, terrified of one man who brings unfathomable suffering.

Katara is in a desert putting aside herself in order to keep everybody moving, to make sure Aang doesn't give up. Katara yells at Toph and Zuko and everyone because she claims all responsibility as hers. She listens to Sokka admit that she is the only mother he's ever known. She is holding a broken boy in her arms while he weeps for something irreplaceable, making ironclad promises of love and family.

(_Mako feels Bolin's cheeks tug into a smile against his shoulder, and Mako smiles too_)

—-

Mako is somewhere between asleep and awake, hovering in the pocket of warmth beneath the blanket, like he is floating in the ocean. There's a quiet undercurrent, rolling in slow circles like waves, like the breaths of the two sleeping boys next to him. It's dark and mysterious because he doesn't know if he's ever felt like this before.

He lets his eyes flutter open to find that Ikki is in the armchair by herself, tucked into her nap with a blanket, head tipped back and mouth open. He sighs and Bolin's black curls tickle his nose, like when he would bury his face into his little brother's hair to escape the empty cold of alleyway nights.

He's never been capable of falling back into sleep once awake, so he lifts himself free of the blankets, with the practiced ease of an older brother slipping off to work each morning at dawn. Meelo is lifted, cradled against his chest as he adjusts blankets, tips Bolin's head to rest atop Jinora's, and settles the youngest child against his brother. Because he knows Bolin will hate it, he musses up his hair until it curls and falls against his forehead. He is the older brother, after all.

—-

Wandering around the house reveals that Korra went out on that hunting trip after all, with Asami and Tonraq. Based on the sounds of cracking earth and water, Senna and Lin made good on their promise to spar. Tenzin and Pema are nowhere to be found, but Mako sees a golden light flood the hallway coming from their bedroom, where soft voices are singing to a baby.

Katara is back in the kitchen, settled at a chair, shucking open more clams.

Mako feels light and warm and heavy all at the same time, and there is no start and end to the way his skin meets the air of the room. His throat feels rounded, resisting against each swallow, but in a good way.

He pulls out the chair he sat in before and dips his hand over the cool, wet ridges of the basket of clams, feeling gritty black mud embedded against the shells. He pulls one free and picks up his knife to help.

"Oh, you don't have to help," Katara lightly scolds. "Go on back to your nap."

"No, it's fine," he says.

She sighs shortly, lips pursing, and Mako cracks a smile. After a moment she drops the pout and smiles back.

"What?" she asks.

"Hm?"

"Why are you smiling at me like that?"

Mako shakes his head and snorts, dipping the blade into the yellowed clam innards, freeing it from the shell. "Just - when you pouted, you looked like Korra."

She laughs and continues her work. "Oh, I see."

They work in comfortable silence for a while, and Mako is reminded of working at the Republic City docks, where Bolin grew up part Water Tribe because the people were kind to them. The air smells like salt and there's that pressing roll and breath of the ocean all around, inhaling and exhaling, like being cradled in a pair of arms strong and soft enough to hold the world.

—-

When the work is done and no one has come to bother them, they lean against the backs of creaking wooden chairs that pop with age, like their own spines. When Katara sighs, Mako sighs too, with the satisfaction of being able to relax with the knowledge of everyone safe in their own place.

"I hope my stories didn't bore you," Katara says with a laugh.

Mako feels slightly embarrassed and jarred from her sudden breaking of silence, so he shakes his head, palms waving in the air. "No, no, I didn't mean to fall asleep, that never happens -"

"- Well, I was nearly finished anyway," she says. "I can finish it now for you, if you want."

He's surprised that she's serious, but he is dying to hear more of the stories. He feels like Ikki, lighthearted and young, gripping onto Gran Gran's thick blue sleeve and begging to hear stories, all about a man and a time to which he didn't belong.

He felt, which each fond chuckle, each resurfacing of memories, that he did stake some claim to this private knowledge. To the words that never made it into the history books.

He nods, smiling shakily. "If you don't mind."

—-

"So you believe in all that?" Mako asks.

Katara doesn't lift her head from watching the dark tea she pours into two clay cups. "Believe in what?"

"Fate," Mako says, taking the cup she hands him (thank you). "Destiny. All that stuff your Gran Gr -_grandmother_ told you? About Aang?"

Katara purses her lips together for a second as she slides into her seat, holding her own cup of tea. "Yes. I do."

"I - can I ask why?"

She chuckles. "This concerns you a lot, doesn't it?"

"Well…yeah. I guess so."

She smiles at him knowingly and he feels like a skeptic, like when _we went to a town where everyone believed every word of a fortune teller named Aunt Wu, and my brother was adamant about proving her to be a fraud_, but he wants to believe her.

"It's funny, how I was always so willing to find hope, even in lies, while you are reluctant to admit when you've found it," she says, still with that smile, and it makes him feel so young. "I will just repeat what my grandmother told me: you and your brother found Korra for a reason. Now your destinies are intertwined with hers."

He thinks of being a young war hero, the last of a dead family, loving the Avatar, raising a brother, seeing a parent fall. He thinks of a brother with a willingness to prove that he is a man and independent. A pair of siblings with nothing to their name that they could possibly lose by following the Avatar to the ends of the earth.

It's not so hard to believe anymore.

—-

"_Destinies?_" Bolin repeats.

Mako nods from his bed, staring across the room to his brother, who sits up and plays with Pabu because the nap from before keeps them both awake.

Bolin frowns, pulling an exaggerated face, before relaxing with a shrug.

"Yeah, sure. I guess I've heard weirder," and he contemplates the topic for another moment before his face breaks into a wide grin. "Destiny is a funny thing, huh?"

Mako knows Bolin loves the idea and will use it later to propel them all forward into more dangerous adventures, but Mako remembers stories of hope and tries to be like a girl from the bottom of the world.

"Sure is, Bo."


End file.
